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Bun B (born Bernard Freeman) has been a force in Texas hip-hop since he and Pimp C started UGK (Underground Kingz) in the late 1980s. UGK helped define the “dirty South” variant of gangsta rap as a realm of alpha males, available women, candy-painted cars, cough syrup, threats, alliances and wild club nights. In UGK, Bun B’s low, emphatically rhythmic voice made him the deeper, more stable rapper, the counterpoint to Pimp C’s reckless taunts and comic syncopations.

Pimp C’s death last year, from an accidental overdose of codeine syrup, has a sobering effect on “II Trill,” Bun B’s second solo album, which pays frequent tribute to Pimp C. While Pimp C was imprisoned in 2002-6 for violating probation, Bun B was a prolific guest rapper for acts from Young Jeezy to Beyoncé, and in 2005 he released the first “Trill.” (UGK returned with a two-CD album in 2007.) But “Trill” was a hodgepodge, while “II Trill” is a serious statement with all the contradictions of a crack-dealing, God-fearing, gun-toting, community-minded persona.

The album begins with brash advertisements for the gangsta life, as guests like Lil Wayne, Lupe Fiasco and Chamillionaire flaunt solidarity and regional pride, extending the “dirty South” from Jamaica to Chicago. “Trill” is slang for staying loyal to a neighborhood, and the new album is also about the ghetto and about a gangsta’s second thoughts. “I ain’t proud of what I did, and if I could go back in time/I’d try to find another way instead of packin’ nines,” Bun B raps in “If I Die II Night.”

Once again Bun B plunges into the details, dangers and elaborate outlaw code of the crack trade. In “My Block” he raps, “We don’t play with no kids unless we done made ’em/We don’t talk to police unless we done paid ’em.” But partway through the album boasts turn to anger and mourning. In “Get Cha Issue” he insists that a gun-slinging crack dealer can be more righteous than hypocritical preachers, brutal policemen or politicians who voted for war in Iraq. (The track samples Janis Joplin, who, like Bun B, was born in Port Arthur, Tex.) And in “If It Was Up II Me,” with a raw vocal from the reggae singer Junior Reid, Bun B denounces unfair school financing: “Education leads to jobs, and jobs kill poverty.”

The tracks on “II Trill” are brawnier and slicker than before. The minor chords are pumped up with reverb and orchestral heft (though the horns and strings are synthesized), and the songs are full of pop vocal melodies, like the Jamaican singer Sean Kingston’s harmony choruses in “That’s Gangsta.” Bun B is aiming this album far beyond the neighborhood. JON PARELES

The record business is in tatters, but aging pop stars have lots of ways to stay working. Between the concert circuit and the labels that seem to be doing good business with what Billboard magazine calls “heritage artists,” the prerequisites for a comeback are getting rarer.

Donna Summer’s new album, “Crayons,” would seem to belong to that shrinking category. Ms. Summer is now 59, and this is her first full studio record of new material in 17 years. To hear the breadth of her gospel-trained pop voice and to consider how younger D.J.’s and bands (Tim Goldsworthy, Hercules and Love Affair, Cut Copy) have seized upon and expanded Ms. Summer’s kind of late-’70s disco is to know that it is possible for her to make a great new record. But “Crayons,” though consistently good-natured and glossily wise about life’s learning curves, isn’t it. It’s a Los Angeles pop record, seemingly made by committee; it has no center. With a list of young producers including Greg Kurstin and Toby Gad, the album tries to be many things: a Mary J. Blige record, a Mariah Carey record, a Tina Turner record, a Shania Twain record (the countryish song of relationship contentment, “Sand on My Feet”) and finally, a little too halfheartedly, a hard-core dance-floor record.

Naturally Ms. Summer puffs her return into a mythical event: in “The Queen Is Back,” over an insistent, needling hip-hop track (it sounds like opening-credit music for the 11 o’clock news), she sings: “So many years ago, on the radio/she crept into your soul/and loved to love you oh-oh.” Within one stanza she has sung about herself in the third person and referred to the titles of two of her hit songs. Not bad.

Photo

"II Trill" by Bun B.

It’s “I’m a Fire,” the album’s first single — a seven-minute throwback to the Hi-NRG disco of the ’70s — that stands as the beacon of promise; it stretches out and allows her to sing in chants, using the fullness of her now deeper and stronger (and slightly auto-tuned) voice. You can lose yourself in this song, and it’s hard not to imagine an entire album like this, done with clearer direction. BEN RATLIFF

JULIANNE HOUGH“Julianne Hough” (Mercury)

Julianne Hough knows how to make other people look good. As one of the professional partners on “Dancing With the Stars,” she has twice won the competition, both times paired with professional athletes — the Olympic skater Apolo Anton Ohno and the Indianapolis 500 winner Hélio Castroneves. In the season that concludes this week, partnered with the heavy-footed radio host Adam Carolla, she lasted, mercifully, just three weeks.

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On her debut country album, Ms. Hough (pronounced huff) is again only as successful as her partners, though here she is the novice, an adequate vocalist tackling material slightly out of her depth. Best is the breathy “Hide Your Matches” — as in, “I could spark like thin white paper wrapped tight ’round some cigarette.” (Hillary Lindsey, one of its writers, has been responsible for many of Carrie Underwood hits.) The wistful “Jimmy Ray McGee” preaches abstinence — “Jimmy Ray McGee/Asked me to the senior prom/But I went on another boy’s arm/Heard he made someone else a mom” — but doesn’t feel dogmatic.

The veteran producer David Malloy can’t completely rescue Ms. Hough from her shortcomings. “Help Me, Help You,” about alcohol addiction, is a soundtrack song in search of a treacly Lifetime movie, and “Dreaming Under the Same Moon,” a duet with Ms. Hough’s brother, Derek (also a “Dancing With the Stars” professional), is nominally creepy.

But while she shows off a few moves in the video for the plucky single “That Song in My Head,” Ms. Hough’s greatest accomplishment here is that there is no trace of the dancer left (though would one Western swing number have been too much to ask for?). As she’s helped mold her partners into something like dancers, so has her team turned Ms. Hough into something like a singer. JON CARAMANICA

Obscurity suits the Dresden Dolls, composed of the singer-songwriter-pianist Amanda Palmer and the drummer Brian Viglione. Not that this Boston duo shirks the spotlight or any sort of adulation; its preferred brand of obscurity has to do with overstuffed attics and stage-whispered confessions. For the fans who pore over Ms. Palmer’s lyrics — and the assorted freaks who add to the atmosphere of any Dresden Dolls show — a cryptic, carnivalesque sensibility multiplies the group’s appeal.

So it doesn’t much matter that “No, Virginia ...” is a clutter of B sides, curios and leftovers. This is a band that encourages obsession along with melodrama. A few songs were recorded during the sessions for the last Dresden Dolls album, “Yes, Virginia ...” (Roadrunner, 2006), while others have a recent provenance. With the exception of one pointed cover, the Psychedelic Furs tune “Pretty in Pink,” all are originals by Ms. Palmer.

The turbulent choruses, allusive wordplay and pounding piano interludes faithfully hew to the self-defined subgenre Brechtian-punk cabaret. There’s a certain amount of kitsch baked into this equation, as the band acknowledges: a video for this album’s first single, “Night Reconnaissance,” depicts Ms. Palmer stealing garden gnomes by the light of suburban streetlamps. But any humor offered by the Dresden Dolls feels like a weak salve, some token consolation in the face of bitter disappointments.

Ms. Palmer, singing in her plain but expressive alto, gives voice to those moments with emphatic power. (On “The Mouse and the Model” she sounds like Linda Perry in the 1990s alternative-rock band 4 Non Blondes.) Her best performance arrives on “Boston,” which closes the album. “There is nothing in the world that we can count on,” she wails, tragically. “Even that we will wake up is an assumption.”

Then, in a much quieter tone: “But I know for a fact that I loved someone/And for about a year he lived in Boston.” She sounds as self-conscious as ever, but there’s something potent about her shift from the pseudo-philosophical to the frankly personal. For a moment the elaborate artifice takes a back seat to straightforward human emotion. NATE CHINEN